London in the Slump

Posted on October 4, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A new book has been published about London in the 1930s. This is entitled Playboys and Mayfair Men and is written by Angus McLaren, Professor Emeritus at University of Victoria. The book focuses on a sensational jewel robbery at the Hyde Park Hotel, one of Waugh’s favorite London venues. Here’s a excerpt from the description of its contents on Project Muse:

In Playboys and Mayfair Men, Angus McLaren recounts the violent robbery and sensational trial that followed. He uses the case as a hook to draw the reader into a revelatory exploration of key interwar social issues from masculinity and cultural decadence to broader anxieties about moral decay. In his gripping depiction of Mayfair’s celebrity high life, McLaren describes the crime in detail, as well as the police investigation, the suspects, their trial, and the aftermath of their convictions. He also• examines the origins and cultural meanings of the playboy—the male 1930s equivalent of the 1920s flapper; • includes in his cast of characters such well-known figures as Noël Coward, Evelyn Waugh, the Churchills, Robert Graves, Oswald Mosley, and Edward VIII; and• convincingly links disparate issues such as divorce reform, corporal punishment, effeminacy, and fascism.

In another article, the 1930s practice of basing book titles on previous literary works is considered. This appears in the Shelter Island (NY) Reporter. The most prominent of these are The Grapes of Wrath, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Sound and the Fury. But the article also lists other notable examples including this one:

— “A Handful of Dust:” A book by Evelyn Waugh usually grouped with the early satires that established his reputation as the best comic novelist of his era. But this novel has dark undertones and its unexpected resolution is downright sinister. Waugh foreshadowed the shift in mood when he chose for his title a T.S. Eliot line from “The Wasteland:” “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

There are a few more recent examples such as Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Jerusalem but the practice seems to have flourished during Waugh’s most prolific period.

Finally, in a booksblog called Bookriot, blogger Clay Andres referred to Donald Trump’s multiple references in a speech at the United Nations to a nonexistent African country he called “Nambia” (perhaps conflating Namibia and Zambia). Andres is inspired to look for other examples of fictional (or as Trump might put it “fake”) countries on that continent. There is no shortage and among them are these:

Nowhere is this trend more apparent than literature, where authors and artists have been using made-up, “Africanish” names to as a way to describe some distant, unknowable place rather than referring to a real countries with real, distinct histories. Famous English novelist Evelyn Waugh did this a number of times, creating the countries of Ishmaella [sic] and Azania for his classic works Scoop and Black Mischief, respectively.

Well, not exactly. The fake country in Scoop was “Ishmaelia” so Donald Trump isn’t the only one challenged by African names.

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Waugh and the Magnet

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Blogger George Simmers has recently posted on his weblog Great War Fiction a report of his visit to an exhibit of volumes from Philip Larkin’s personal library. This was at the University of Hull where Larkin served at the Librarian. In addition to the expected examples of works by Larkin’s contemporaries, he was impressed to find a substantial collection of issues of the Magnet, a schoolboy magazine. This was the journal “in which ‘Frank Richards’ each week delivered new instalments of the exploits of Harry Wharton, Billy Bunter and co. at Greyfriars School.” The blogger also found Waugh’s works well-represented in Larkin’s personal library and was inspired to make this connection:

If ever I write another thesis it will be on the influence of Frank Richards on later twentieth century literature. The prime exhibit will be Evelyn Waugh (who is also well represented on Larkin’s bookshelves.) Waugh was a keen reader of the Magnet while at school (an illicit reader, but all the keener for being illicit); the bold caricaturist style of his satire shows the influence of Richards, I’d say – though he went further, and in Llanabba created a school even more gloriously bizarre than Greyfriars.

The Larkin exhibit closed on 1 October.

In another reference to Waugh’s schooldays, Lancing College has posted a photograph and description of the house he lived in as a student. This is called “Head’s” and is described in the website:

With space for seventy-five day boys, Head’s is the largest House in the school. First occupied in 1857 as the Headmaster’s boarding House, it has since been converted into generous accommodation for the day boys at Lancing.

Waugh’s residency is also briefly noted under the history of the house:

The novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote about his experience as a boy in Head’s in the early 1920s. Other well-known alumni of the House include the tenor Sir Peter Pears, the historian Sir Roger Fulford, the artist Frederick Gore, the Arctic explorer Gino Watkins, Judge Peter Birts and the footballer Andrew Frampton.

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Waugh in the World

Posted on October 2, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In the current issue of the Italian-language Roman Catholic website Radio Spada, Luca Fumagalli has written an article briefly summarizing what looks like all of Waugh’s novels. The article is in Italian and its title is translated “Teddy Bears, Rosaries, and Wine Stains: A Short Journey through the Novels of Evelyn Waugh”.

In the Indian newspaper The Hindu, there is a review of a new novel set in the 2011 political turmoil in Egypt. The novel is entitled The City Always Wins and is written by Omar Robert Hamilton. One of its themes is the lack of support for the 2011 Egyptian revolution in the countryside. The reviewer (Tabish Khair) describes some of the supporters of the revolution in the novel as “pathos liberals” and cites Evelyn Waugh’s story “The Man who Liked Dickens”:

Mine is not the sort of swooning compliment showered in liberal and leftist circles on this moving novel, but it is not a dismissal either. After all, one of my favourite authors — Charles Dickens … — belongs solidly to the tradition of ‘pathos liberalism.’ But let’s face it: the man who liked Dickens, to refer to the title and agenda of Evelyn Waugh’s savagely satirical story, is no longer just a man or just confined to the Amazonian forests. I will return to this…[T]he aim of this book is impassioned reportage rather than critical insight — which makes it a novel destined to appeal to both the pathos liberalism and the pathos leftism of literary circles in London and New York. But Hamilton cannot be faulted for that, can he? Surely, just as Dickens could not be faulted for the reader in Waugh’s story, the man who liked the pathos of Dickens from his safe, self-centred and (finally) complicit isolation?

For a better understanding of what the reviewer means by “pathos” liberalism and leftism, one needs to read the full review which is available here. Waugh’s story was adopted as the conclusion of his novel A Handful of Dust.

Finally, from another part of Africa comes a opinion article in the New York Times Sunday Review section reporting that the Latin Mass, which Waugh championed in the wake of Vatican II reforms, is alive and well in remoter parts of Nigeria. The article by Matthew Schmitz, editor of the nondenominational religious journal First Things, recounts the history of the unsuccessful attempts to introduce the vernacular Mass among Nigerian tribesman and brings it up to date with the reintroduction of the Latin Mass in more recent years. He cites Evelyn Waugh on this issue:

Evelyn Waugh, a Catholic, realized that these external changes [from Latin to the vernacular] were connected with essential matters. “More than the aesthetic changes which rob the church of poetry, mystery and dignity,” he wrote, “there are suggested changes in faith and morals which alarm me.”

Schmitz concludes with a reference to Waugh’s 1930s story “Out Of Depth” in which Waugh, in a Rip van Winkle episode, saw the Africans as the saviors of the Roman Catholic church in a future London where they had colonized the enfeebled white race:

When the Latin Mass was suppressed at the end of Waugh’s life, his youthful vision of it being said forever looked like folly. If it seems likelier today, it is due in part to people like Bishop Ochiagha and the worshipers here who have preserved an inheritance rejected by others. Against all odds, the body of Christ remains “a shape in chaos,” marked but unbroken by the passing of time.

The story, which was quoted by Schmitz in a recent post, is included in Waugh’s Complete Stories.

UPDATE: In the above posting, the description of the journal First Things was edited.

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New Edward St Aubyn Novel Published

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

A new novel by  Edward St Aubyn (well known in this parish) has been published in both the UK and USA. This is Dunbar and is a reimagining of Macbeth in the Hogarth Shakespeare series. This involves leading writers such as Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterston and Howard Jacobson rewriting Shakespeare’s plays as novels. Here’s the introduction from a review in Maclean’s magazine in Canada (which also ties his works back to Evelyn Waugh):

The Hogarth Shakespeare project… has been beyond sharp in its pairings so far. But none is as inspired as turning loose Edward St. Aubyn, chronicler of upper-class British depravity, on King Lear. St. Aubyn, 57, has written five novels about the Melroses, a fictionalized version of his own wealthy family, openly portraying how he was raped repeatedly by his father between the ages of five and eight, his ineffectual mother, his prodigious youthful drug abuse and suicide attempts. What makes the novels art is not the horrific origin story, though, but their meld of suffering and corrosive social comedy—nightmares filtered through an Evelyn Waugh lens. And whether it’s personal history or Shakespeare’s dramatic power that form the root of his literary obsession, critics have noted that St. Aubyn often references Lear in his work and conversation.

This is a particularly active period in literary publishing, with the new biography of Anthony Powell and new novels by Alan Hollinghurst as well as St Aubyn. There is another review of the Powell biography in the Observer which emphasizes the influences of Powell, Waugh, Greene and Orwell on each other:

Tony Powell was born in 1905, part of a brilliant generation that included Eric Blair, AKA George Orwell (1903), Evelyn Waugh (1903), Malcolm Muggeridge (1903) and Graham Greene (1904). Among these headstrong Edwardian boys, inside-outsiders all, Powell, who outlived them, is the least colourful and the most English: phlegmatically reserved, aloof and nonconformist. He was, in the heyday of his 12-volume masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time, very much a a contender, but has now been eclipsed. In posterity’s cruel audit, A Dance lingers as a curiosity in secondhand bookshops, while its author is almost as neglected, outshone by Orwell, Waugh et al. Hilary Spurling’s authorised biography arrives in the nick of time to remind us of her subject’s quiet genius. Addressing Powell’s “work, life and loves”, hers is the first full-scale life. It must also, perforce, grapple with what we might call the Powell Problem. Powell’s milieu has come to seem dated, its texture threadbare and its colours faded. He is not a moralist like Orwell, nor a great satirist like Waugh. He lacks Greene’s Manichean ferocity. He is, perhaps, too true to himself to be in the company of those big beasts

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New Hollinghurst Novel Reviewed in Guardian

Posted on September 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Guardian reviewed Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel earlier this week. The review is by Alex Preston and opens with a link to a Waugh novel:

Alan Hollinghurst’s sixth novel, The Sparsholt Affair, opens in Oxford during the second world war and ends in London in 2012. … This is a book about gay life, about art, about family, but most of all it’s about the remorseless passage of time. The 1940 section of the book is narrated by a bright but not quite brilliant undergraduate …. If the opening section of The Stranger’s Child [Hollinghurst’s previous novel] doffed its cap to EM Forster and Henry James, the line between tribute and pastiche never quite resolved, this is Hollinghurst showing that he can do an Oxford novel as well as Waugh. He’s wonderful on the “beautiful delay” of university life, on the cloisters and the quadrangles, tentative intimacies building between friends and lovers.

Luke O’Neill, Professor of Biochemistry at Trinity College, Dublin, offers this advice to today’s students in the Irish student newspaper University Times:

Evelyn Waugh the great English writer once said there were only two grades worth getting at university – a first (the top grade) or a third (barely a pass). I will paraphrase him – a first means you are really good, a 2.1 means you tried but probably shouldn’t have bothered, a 2.2 means you’re not that good (at least at the subject you’ve been studying), but a third, well, that means you had a damn good time. In these troubled times (and remember all times are troubled, but usually for different reasons) a university should be a haven, a mother (hence the term alma mater) and an oasis of learning and research. A place apart, which “sticks it to the man”.

The advice comes, if memory serves, from Charles Ryder’s Cousin Jasper in Brideshead Revisited. Waugh himself passed his exams with a poor third class grade but never received his degree because he went down before completing his residency requirement.

An amusing review by Mark Voger of the 1960s film adaptation of Waugh’s novel The Loved One is posted on NJ.com. Here’s the opening:

The 1965 farce is all of the following: madcap, irreverent, dark, poetic, fearless, reckless, lyrical, sick, ahead of its time, brimming with social commentary, hilarious. A sendup of the funeral industry that really sends up the American way itself, “The Loved One” is in that exalted realm of sublime black comedies alongside Charlie Chaplin‘s “The Great Dictator” and Stanley Kubrick‘s “Dr. Strangelove.” But it’s not for everyone.

Finally, Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust is reviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal by Anka Muhlstein. That article is behind a paywall but may be of interest to those with a subscription.

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At Hertford College with ‘Waugh’s Enemies’ and Friends

Posted on September 30, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The following account was written by Milena Borden who attended the lecture in Oxford earlier this week. Many thanks to Milena for her report:

The title of the Monday afternoon discussion in the Dining Hall of Hertford College was as wonderful as the event. Waugh’s identity at Oxford (1923–1926) dominated the expertly conversation between the three panellists and just over twenty people in the audience including dons, publishers, the college archivist, PhD students and admirers of Waugh. Barbara Cooke, an editor of A Little Learning, Volume 19 of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (OUP) displayed for sale at the door, illustrated her presentation with a slide show of the faces Waugh disliked, whereas Ann Pasternak Slater intercepted with erudite comments about how he transformed them into stylish and often comic fictional characters.

Unsurprisingly, Waugh’s tutor, C.R. M. F. Cruttwell, became the centre of a lively debate with Alexander Waugh following in what it seems to be by now a family tradition of making a caricature of the don’s habits and tastes. However, Christopher J. Tyerman, Professor of the History of the Crusades at Hertford defended him passionately saying that it must have been very frustrating to have Waugh as a student and also claiming that Cruttwell, despite of what Waugh thought about him, was an excellent scholar whose A History of the Great War: 1914-1918 (1934) became a classic. I was honoured to be given the chance to talk about Waugh’s feud with the Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, and also about his intense and anecdotal disapproval of the Yugoslav communist leader Tito he met during the Second World War. This led to a broader reflection on Waugh’s political opinions and allegiance to the Catholic religion and Campion Hall, which came after Hertford. There were delicious details about Waugh’s friends and loves at Oxford, and a discovery that Randolph Churchill was an enemy and a friend at the same time. The greatest strength of the gathering was that it was unmistakably a Hertford event with no drinks or rolling laughter, which so much characterised Waugh’s life outside its walls. But of course a discussion of a reasonable length, as this one was, cannot include everything about Waugh in Oxford.

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Breitbart: Blows Fall in Alabama

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

Breitbart news, in-house journal of the alt-right and home of former Trump insider Steve Bannon, has quoted Evelyn Waugh in a story gloating about the results of the Alabama primary earlier this week:

In his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, author Evelyn Waugh describes a main character’s latest crisis as “a blow, expected, repeated, falling upon a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne.”… “A dull and sickening pain” is exactly what McConnell and his allies in the GOP establishment and donor class must have felt Tuesday night as they watched their chosen candidate, former D.C. lobbyist Luther Strange, get crushed underfoot by Moore, despite outspending Moore by as much as 10-1.

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Novelists Review Powell Biography

Posted on September 29, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

In yesterday’s papers, two novelists review the new biography of Anthony Powell by Hilary Spurling. Philip Hensher in the Spectator declares that Powell has finally received the biography he deserves. He also discusses the relationship of Powell and Evelyn Waugh:

The five novels [Powell] wrote in the 1930s fell under the shadow of Waugh and even of Henry Green; they are extraordinarily dry, and met with only very moderate success, though their brilliance has never been in doubt. The last of them, indeed, was published days before the war broke out and was a minor casualty of the conflict. Powell had a mixed war, though relations between him and the army never broke down as spectacularly as they did in the case of Evelyn Waugh — in person, he was always much more emollient, though perhaps not very competent.

In the Guardian Claire Messud also praises the biography and offers her own favorable judgment of  Powell’s work. She too includes Waugh in her discussion, citing the same assessment Waugh made of Powell’s work as quoted by Hilary Spurling in the recent Times article.  See previous post. Messud concludes that discussion:

…Waugh rightly salutes “the permeating and inebriating atmosphere of the haphazard” so distinctive to Powell’s oeuvre…In the immediate postwar years, Powell struggled again with depression, and was at sea as a writer: “Contemporaries like Waugh, Greene, and even Orwell were beginning to think about collected editions but he had published nothing for eight years, and was nowhere near starting a new novel. The closest he had got was to spend the last year re-reading Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,” Spurling writes of a frantic period in which Powell was reviewing approximately a book a day. This rediscovery of Proust proved definitive for Powell, who came to envision a new way of writing, and a project that would consume him for the next 25 years. A Question of Upbringing was published in 1951.

UPDATE (29 September 2017): Lara Feigel, author of The Love Charm of Bombs, a literary history of WWII London, has reviewed the biography of Anthony Powell in the Financial Times. She also features a discussion of Evelyn Waugh’s relationship with Powell which opens her review:

Reviewing the sixth volume of A Dance to the Music of Time [The Kindly Ones] in 1962, Anthony Powell’s long-time friend and some-time rival Evelyn Waugh paid generous tribute. “Less original novelists tenaciously follow their protagonists”, Waugh wrote, but Powell’s method was different. Here we watched the characters through the glass of a tank: “one after another various specimens swim towards us; we see them clearly, then with a barely perceptible flick of fin or tail, they are off into the murk”. For Waugh, Powell had succeeded in capturing nothing less than the haphazard daily experience of life.

Waugh also reviewed the fifth volume (Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant) but liked it less than he had the others. Both reviews appeared in the Spectator and the earlier one is reprinted in Waugh’s Essays, Articles and Reviews. In the one quoted by Feigel and several others, Waugh thought Powell was back on form, and he enjoyed it as much as he had the earlier volumes.

 

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Put Out More Rabans

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The London Review of Books has published a biographical description of his father’s experience in the early days of WWII by Jonathan Raban. One of the few literary allusions in the article is Raban’s reference to Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags in connection with his father’s experience of the “phoney war” in the months before the German invasion of France and the Low Countries. According to Raban:

 the most conspicuous feature of the Phoney War was the havoc caused by the ‘evacuees’ from the big cities: several million school-age children, along with pregnant women and mothers with their under-fives, who were bundled onto trains and sent out into the countryside in the first four days of September 1939. This chaos, born of bureaucratic panic and a gross overestimation of the likely casualties of German bombing raids, was called Operation Pied Piper, and it plays a central part in Evelyn Waugh’s seriocomic novel of the Phoney War, Put Out More Flags.

The LRB introduction explains that Raban, who has written several travel books (as well as  novels and essays) reminiscent of Evelyn Waugh, suffered a stroke in 2011 and is only now beginning to be able to write again. He may well be a distant relative of Waugh whose mother’s maiden name was Catherine Raban. It’s not a common name, and both seem to have clergymen in their family backgrounds. Jonathan Raban previously commented on Waugh’s novel in a National Public Radio interview (All Things Considered) in 2008. Here’s an excerpt:

…For my money, Waugh is the greatest stylistic craftsman of the 20th century. Tone-deaf to music, he was pitch-perfect when it came to the music of the English language. I love the limpidness of his writing, its shocking clarity. Put Out More Flags is as tightly constructed — point and counterpoint — as a baroque fugue. If it begins in something close to farce, it darkens steadily, like a long summer sunset, as 1940 wears on, and gravity becomes the order of the day. Even Basil Seal eventually finds a serious job — in a commando unit, where, fighting Nazis overseas, being an incorrigible rogue will make good moral sense. His transformation, from bounder to useful soldier, mirrors the transformation of a whole society, as Britain learned, slowly and painfully, how to fight for its survival…

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Julia’s Meltdown and the “Filial Correction”

Posted on September 27, 2017 by Jeffrey Manley

The Catholic Herald has an article by its US editor Michael Davis in which he explains what is politely called the “filial correction” in Roman Catholic circles. This is a group which has written to the Pope explaining how he may have gotten it a bit wrong in his Amoris Laetitia pronouncement. Davis uses the scene from Brideshead Revisited where Julia hysterically breaks up with Charles Ryder to make a point. This is the scene near the novel’s end (which Davis quotes in full) where she confronts her adultery:

Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it’s fretful. Always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. “Poor Julia,” they say, “she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her little sin. A pity it ever lived,” they say, “but it’s so strong. Children like that always are. Julia’s so good to her little, mad sin.”

Davis makes his case in the article that this scene explains how Waugh would have come out in favor of the “filial correction.” It would be foolhardy and presumptuous to attempt to paraphrase or summarize his argument, but the full text is available in the article linked above. He concludes by linking back to Waugh:

Adultery doesn’t stop being a sin just because we “draw the curtains on it.” Our conscience won’t grow stronger if we “put it to sleep with a tablet of Dial when it’s fretful.” Sin has consequences. Waugh knew that. So do the authors of the filial correction. The question is, does the Pope?

The online version is headed by a handsome photograph of Waugh and his second wife at their marriage ceremony. His first marriage ended in divorce due to his wife’s adultery.

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